 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
ARTHUR CHARLES CLARKE (1917-2008) - pseudonyms: Charles Willis, E.G. O'Brien | |
|
UK writer, one of the grand masters of science fiction with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Apart from his literary endeavours, however, Arthur C. Clarke is remembered as the inventor of communication satellite, an idea he first expounded in a 1945 article entitled 'Extraterrestial Relays.' Clarke's professional writing career spanned over five decades. -"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Arthur C. Clarke was born at the coast town of Minehead, the eldest of four children. His father, Charles Wright Clarke, was a farmer; he died in 1931. Clarke's mother was a post office telegrapher. Left with her children, she gave riding lessons to augment the family income. Clarke became interested in science in early age. While at Huish's Grammar School, Clarke started to writes 'fantastic' stories which were published in school magazines and fan magazines. He was an avid reader of the magazine Astounding Stories, devoured works from such writers as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and built transmitters and chrystal radio sets. His first telescope Clarke constructed at thirteen. On leaving school Clarke worked in the Exchequer and Adult Department in London. His job involved auditing teacher pensions. Clarke's apartment became the meeting place of the British Interplanetary Society, which he had joined when he was sixteen, and in 1949 he was appointed chairman of the BIS. From 1941 to 1946 Clarke served in the Royal Air Force, specializing in radar and eventually rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. During the service Clarke sold his first science-fiction story to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. In 1945 he wrote a technical paper that was the forerunner of communication satellites. The essay war reprinted in ASCENT TO ORBIT, a collection of his technical writings, that he brought out after receiving the Marconi Award in 1982 for his contributions to communications technology. Clarke's non-science fiction novel, GLIDE PATH (1963) was based on a testing program for the first blind approach radar. After the war Clarke entered King's College, London, and took two years later his B.Sc. with honours in physics and mathematics in 1948. His first published novel, PRELUDE TO SPACE, was written in three weeks during the summer of 1947. From 1949 to 1951 he was an assistant editor of Physics Abstracts. Since 1952 Clarke worked as a full-time writer. In the 1950s Clarke became interested in undersea exploration. He settled in 1956 permanently in Sri Lanka, where he wrote several fiction and nonfiction books and articles about the Indian Ocean. With his friend Mike Wilson he filmed the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, from which his novel THE DEEP RANGE (1957) derives. Clarke also served as a director of Rocket Publishing, London, Underwater Safaris, Colombo, and Spaceward Corporation, New York. Fortunate to see his visions turn into reality, Clarke also appeared as commentator on CBS TV for the Apollo 11, 12 and 15 Moon missions. Due to a severe attack of polio in 1962, Clarke became completely paralyzed. As his farewell to the sea he wrote DOLPHIN ISLAND. After recovering Clarke started his cooperation with the director Stanley Kubrick. Later he accompanied his friend Mike Wilson on an underwater adventure six miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, which was depicted in THE TREASURE OF THE GREAT REEF (1964). However, Clarke still spent over six months out of his beloved island because of tax laws. In 1975 the Indian government presented him with a satellite dish, with which he was able to receive programs broadcast from experimental satellite ATS6. "The island of Ceylon is a small universe; it contains as many variations of culture, scenery, and climate as some countries a dozen times its size. What you get from it depends on what you bring; if you never stray from your hotel bar or the dusty streets of westernized Colombo, you could perish of fulminating boredom in a week, and it would serve you right. But if you are interested in people, history, nature, and art - the things that really matter - you may find, as I have, that a lifetime is not enough." (Clarke in The View from Serendip, 1977) In the 1980s Clarke was a presenter of the television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980) and World of Strange Powers (1985). He lectured widely in Britain and in the United States. In 1980 he was Vikram Sarabhai Professor at Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Until 1982 Clarke had written his books with a typewriter, but after the arrival of his first computer – 5 MB of memory – he used only his word processor. Clarke's best known works include the short story THE SENTINEL (1951), about man's contact with sentient life. In the spring of 1964, Clarke retired to Hotel Chelsea in New York and began to write a novel about a space travel. His illustrious acquaintances during this period included Arhur Miller, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer. Clarke's story was the basis of the novel and film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), for which Clarke wrote the script with Stanley Kubrick. The novel was based on the original screenplay. In 2001 a mysterious monolith is found buried beneath the surface of the moon. It send's a signal towards Jupiter. To solve the mystery astronauts are sent to Jupiter with the help of the "infallible" super-computer HAL 9000, voiced in the film by the Canadian actor Douglas Rain. With the amazing machine Clarke presents one of the basic philosophical questions: can there be intelligence without consciousness? After a series of accidents and HAL's operations, one of the astronauts, David Bowman, is left alone as the ship reaches the planet. There he embarks on the final step in humankind's next developmental stage and at the end, as a fetus, symbolizes the birth of the Übermensch. "If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention", Clarke said of the film. Clarke continued the Odyssey Saga in three sequels, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO (1982), 2061: ODYSSEY THREE (1988), and 3001: THE FINAL ODYSSEY (1996). CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) told about the beginning of the age of Humankind after Overlods have eliminated ignorance, disease and poverty. A FALL OF MOONDUST (1961) was a tale of marooned moon schooner, and in RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973) a research team is sent to investigate a cylindrical object hurtling through the solar system. Although Clarke announced that THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE (1979) would be his last work of fiction, he continued his literary activity. With Gentry Lee, the chief engineer on Project Galileo, Clarke wrote CRADLE (1988), originally conceived as a movie project, and RAMA II (1989). Clarke's catastrophe novel THE HAMMER OF GOOD (1993) about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, anticipated such films as Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998). Clarke's Venus Prime series was franchised to Paul Preuss. The Kubrick/Clarke vision from 1968 of computers and space programs at the turn of the century did not came true. In an interview Clarke acknowledged: "We science-fiction writers never attempt to predict. In fact, it's the exact opposite. As my friend Ray Bradbury said, 'We do this not to predict the future but to prevent it.'"(Newsweek, December 2000-February 2001, special edition) Clarke was fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and recipient of many awards for his science fiction. He was the guest of honour at the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention, when he won a Hugo for his story 'The Star'. Rendezvous with Rama won the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Clarke also received the Franklin Gold Medal, and in 1962 the UNESCO-Kalinga Prize for popularizing science. Clarke was made a knight in 1998. In 1954 he married Marilyn Mayfield whom he had met on a trip to Florida; they separated after a few months and divorced officially in 1964. For the last two decades of his life, Clarke suffered from post-polio syndrome. He died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on March 19, 2008. "Nevertheless, it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these." (from 'Is There Life After Television' in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, 1999) A central theme in Clarke's fiction was the "spiritual" rebirth and the search for man's place in the universe. In Rendezvous with Rama the discussions of a research team form an allegory for the great question of the meaning of life. 2001 traces the evolution of man and humanity's quest for existential answers, symbolized by the unearthly monolith. In the sequels technological progress allows to reveal some of the secrets behind the monolith. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", Clarke once said. The technological details of his books were flawless, and often Clarke guessed right new advances in science, but not always. In an article from 1999, 'The Twentieth-First Century: A (Very) Brief History,' he predicted that the last coal mine is closed in 2006, a city in a third world country is devastated in 2009 by the accidental explosion of an A-bomb in its armory, and in 2014 starts the construction of Hilton Orbiter Hotel. A step forwaard with the idea of a space elevator, as dramatized in The Fountains of Paradise, was taken up in the early 2000s. NASA's Institute for Advaced Concepts program funded Bradley C. Edwards' and Eric A. Wrestling's study The Space Elevator (Spaego, San Francisco, 2003). Colin McInnes and Chris Davis published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (vol. 59, 2006) a study of the use of space elevators as energy-free "orbital siphons".
Selected works:
Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008 |
